Classics endure for many reasons. Some serve as eloquent time capsules, portraying a world now gone. Some offer aesthetic beauty and universal themes that transcend eras and cultures. And then there are seminal works that demand our ongoing attention because the full scope of their resonance, urgency, and vision is only visible once the world has started catching up to what the author bravely and brazenly immortalized on the page. Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, the Argentinean masterpiece, does each of these things, but, above all, it does the latter. When I consider its impact on literature and culture within and beyond Latin America, and on readers, including myself, I recall something a lesbian journalist once told me during an interview: I can only read your book with the body I have.
She was right. There is a subjectivity to reading that runs deep in our bones and can contribute to the depths of our knowing. And so, in defiance of the conventions of pre-feminist literary criticism, I will tell you a secret about my own Uruguayan, lesbian, and genderqueer body: the first time I read Kiss of the Spider Woman, years ago, I wept so hard that I could not breathe. That had never happened to me with a book before, nor has it happened since. I’d had an experience that, at the time, I could not yet put into words.
We’re often told to keep our friends close and our enemies closer. Ball reminds us that sometimes we mistake one for the other, and that one of the most important parts of parenting is helping children discern the difference. In “The Pessimists,” a few subplots are left hanging, a few ideas undeveloped — but the novel’s bite and loose structure promise excellent social satire to come from its author.
But to some extent, colour also has a life beyond any individual perception. It exists as both the quality of a thing as well as an approach to that thing, or—as James Fox writes in his new book, The World According to Colour—“a dance between subjects and objects, mind and matter.”
In its beginning, earth was fractured, frail
with coveting, and could not wait for us—
so, flailing in the muscled clutch of grace,
we blessed this sullen place. As we were born